The cow methane problem is one that literally keeps me up at night. I kept thinking about my inevitable switch to chicken and missing out on a tenderloin.. and how my kids won't be able to eat like me.
> The findings, while expected, are quite sobering. Pork, chicken, dairy and eggs are equivalent within a factor of two when it came to their environmental burdens, the authors determined. But beef requires far, far more resources than any of those other protein categories. The team calculated that beef requires 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer and 11 times more water compared to those other food sources. That adds up to about five times more greenhouse gas emissions.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat for a lot of interesting ideas and references.
Today they are using fetal bovine serum as a growth medium, which is both expensive and it is a by-product from the dairy industry.
When a cow coming for slaughter is identified to be pregnant, the cow is slaughtered and bled, and the fetus is removed from the mother and brought into a blood collection facility. The fetus, which is kept alive alive during the following process to ensure blood quality, has a needle inserted into its beating heart. The blood is then drained until the fetus dies. The whole process takes about 5 minutes. The blood is then refined and filtered, and the resulting extract is fetal bovine serum.
Until we no longer extract fetuses, I can't see many animal advocacy groups being that positive about it.
Until we have a plant-based growth medium I won't eat any fake meat myself though.
Good luck with that! Vegans then will "move the goalposts" and attack you for ethhical/morality reasons.